The Pollution Solution
The Pollution Solution Hides In Plain Sight
By: Sergio A. Mendez, Perennially Yours
In August, 2014, in the city of Toledo, Ohio and parts of Michigan, 400,000 people would have died if they had drunk their municipal water. The catastrophe stemmed from a killer algae bloom that affected their Lake Erie water supply; all primarily due to excessive chemical fertilizers and manure that had been building for more than a decade. Toledo mayor D. Michael Collins declared, “People are finally waking up to the fact that this is not acceptable!” Are they really?Similar incidents occurred in the Lake Erie area in 2013, 2011 and all the way back to the 1960s when Lake Erie was declared dead.
And in addition to fertilizers, pesticides contribute mightily to the toxic brew in our yards. Americans use more than one billion pounds of pesticides (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides and others) per year.
While commercial farmers and industry are easy targets concerning water pollution, clearly they should not be the only ones! So how do you get to homeowners; the other major – but hidden in plain sight – target? How do you get them to change voluntarily without government intervention? The Right-Size Flower Garden
Bill Cullina, award winning author and Executive Director of Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens recently provided the following testimonial for Kerry Ann’s upcoming book The Right-Size Flower Garden: “Kerry Mendez has amassed a tremendous knowledge and expertise in horticulture, yet she is able to pass along this knowledge in a completely approachable way that feels more like a friendly conversation over the garden fence than a lecture. Her enthusiasm for flowers and gardening is truly infectious and her passion for sharing is boundless. In this complicated and overscheduled age, Kerry brings a simple, no nonsense approach that will show you how to have beautiful gardens without spending a fortune of time or money.”
Who knew? We can now unlock sustainable environments one homeowner’s yard at a time; without fear and trembling; without lawn or garden police. But the net effect is the same: wise water usage, low or no use of fertilizers using environmentally appropriate ratios, stressing native plants, birds and pollinators, smart designs, plants that require little or no maintenance, and much more. The Right-Size Flower Garden presentation draws audiences and fills rooms – and no wonder, since 80% of households in the U. S. are single family homes with a yard (National Gardening Association). Nothing sells out a room faster than a dynamic speaker telling homeowners just what they wanted to hear (while simultaneously tackling one of the most intractable environmental problems in America today). The right choice is now the easy choice! If we want sustainable environments that will not damage our health we better think critically and act strategically. We have to be well-informed, choose sides and make ourselves heard with our votes as well as our dollars. When we know better we do better – one homeowner’s yard at a time! (photo of my garden) Kerry Ann Mendez in her new book, The Right-Size Flower Garden, has chosen her side and is making herself heard. We hope you will too; for the sake of our planet. Good stewardship is not optional! To explore the many ways Kerry Ann can work with your organization please contact her today. (207) 502-7228 pyours1@gmail.com If you would like to receive our info-packed gardening e-newsletters, featuring gardening tips. great plants & products, flower events and shows, please sign up for our newsletters here. |
Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins raises a glass of tap water before drinking it during a news conference in Toledo, Ohio, Monday, Aug. 4, 2014. A water ban that had hundreds of thousands of people in Ohio and Michigan scrambling for drinking water has been lifted, Collins announced Monday. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
The truth is, the government has few legal options to impose limits on polluters and pollution, and voluntary limits so far have barely dented the problem. The federal Clean Water Act is intended to limit pollution from fixed points like industrial outfalls and sewer pipes, but most of the troublesome phosphorus carried into waterways like Lake Erie is spread over thousands of square miles. Addressing so-called nonpoint source pollution is mostly left to the states, and in many cases, the states have chosen not to act. (
Want to blame the excessive phosphorus all on the farmers? Think again! Eighty four million households in the U. S. work on their lawns and gardens (EPA). That is an enormous amount of potential nonpoint source pollution left to homeowners to limit voluntarily.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service says, “homeowners use up to 10 times more chemicals than farmers do. Some of these chemicals rub off on children and pets, but most are washed … into our streams, lakes and rivers or are absorbed into our groundwater. These are the sources of our drinking water, and tests show these chemicals are indeed contaminating our water supply. What we put on our lawns and gardens winds up in our drinking water, and it is not removed by water treatment. Bottled water is not a solution because it comes from the same sources”. (Dr. Diane Lewis, The New York Times, May 10, 2014)
Right-Size Flower Garden, the new book by renowned author Kerry Ann Mendez accomplishes this by presenting sustainable, environmental gardening in a way that is perceived by homeowners to be just what they had been looking for – an easy to follow and implement way to simplify their outdoor spaces with smart design solutions and plant choices. It is especially aimed at the growing senior gardeners group and the equally gigantic time-pressed younger gardening population. In other words, it is aimed at the vast majority of the eighty-four million households that work on their lawns and gardens and are, therefore, a major factor in nonpoint source pollution.
By appealing to the homeowner gardener’s self interest, Kerry Ann Mendez introduces them, gently and convincingly, to the type of gardening practices now generally advocated by the United States Botanic Garden in Washington D. C. (Kerry Ann is a scheduled presenter at USBG April 18, 2015), The Lady Bird Johnson Wild Flower Center in Austin, Texas and the American Society of Landscape Architects, which together have collaborated in the interdisciplinary program named Sustainable Sites Initiative (